


sing while we're falling apart

by lucyprestons (leviosaphoenix)



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 19:36:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14171991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leviosaphoenix/pseuds/lucyprestons
Summary: It’s just a straightforward mission, except that there’s nothing straightforward about the world Wyatt comes back to.For starters, Lucy Preston has no idea who he is.Post 2x02.





	sing while we're falling apart

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back again! Thank you so much for the response to my other Lucy x Wyatt story. I've spent the last week or so working on this with my best friend Courtenay (who is undoubtedly checking this author's note solely for praise). Her ideas, editing help, and input have been invaluable, even when we break down in hysterics over ridiculous names for OCs or have existential crises over time travel paradoxes and plotholes. I honestly don't know how the Timeless writers do it.
> 
> Hopefully this will help tide everyone over seeing as there's no new episode this week. Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate.
> 
> Title and lyrics from The Wreck of Our Hearts by Sleeping Wolf.
> 
> Lucy x Wyatt Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/12159770374/playlist/6CRkpKIyxtDrcYiru8ZZzK

_There's a cold empty room_  
_There's a windowless view_  
_There's a me without you_  
_but that's not where I belong_  
_Through the waves of the deep_  
_and the storms of the sea_  
_I have you and you me_  
_We're not too far gone_

 

She’s survived serial killers, airship crashes, two different world wars, and the American Revolution, but it’s a nasty case of the flu that sees her confined to her bunk.

“Don’t think for a second that I would let you go on a mission without me,” Lucy protests, but her assertive, I’m-in-charge tone is undermined by the violent sneeze that punctuates it.

“You can barely even sit up,” Wyatt says calmly, lifting an eyebrow as she scowls and wriggles upright to prove him wrong. “Look, it’s a pretty straightforward mission. Jiya tracked one of the Mothership’s lost jumps to Virginia, 1947. All we need to do is work out what Emma did while she was there and fix it.”

“Nothing about this job is straightforward,” Lucy says, rolling her eyes. “We don’t even know what she’s planned there. I feel like there’s something, but I just can’t…” she trails off into a fit of coughing, pulling the red sweater - _his_ red sweater, from the last jump - tighter around herself. “Ugh. This cold is the worst.”

He leans against the doorframe, crossing his arms as he studies her. “For the record, I asked if it could wait until you’re better.”

“I’m fine,” she groans, attempting to stand up and swaying on the spot. Wyatt moves swiftly forward, catching her forearms and slowly lowering her back to the bed.

“You’re are the opposite of fine.”

“The C.I.A.!” she blurts, suddenly. “The C.I.A. was established in 1947. Maybe Emma was planting a sleeper agent to embed themselves within the organization.”

Wyatt places a hand on her shoulder, sitting beside her. “Okay, see? Now we have an idea why we’re going there. We’ll take Jiya with us, instead. It’ll be fine.”

Lucy sneezes.

“When I get back,” Wyatt says, softer this time. “We’ll talk. I promise.”

She looks at him, and even when her eyes are a little less bright, a little more clouded with the haze of illness, he’s struck by the warmth behind them. It’s only been a few weeks since Jiya walked in on them in this same position, even less time since they were nose to nose in the back of a car, a heartbeat away from giving in to… something.

And because time has a way of messing with them, even in the present, they haven’t had a spare moment to talk about it.

His hand lifts to caress her cheek, thumb tracing along her jawline.

“See you later,” he says, and she returns his smile, tiredly.

“Later.”

Wyatt drops his hand after a moment, standing and pulling the blanket up and over her as she lies down.

He’s pretty sure she’s fast asleep by the time he’s left the room.

* * *

The Rittenhouse threat is surprisingly easy to neutralize. Jiya is thrilled at the opportunity to pilot the Lifeboat without being in a life or death situation, and everything goes exactly as planned.

They’re in good spirits when they arrive back, and even Agent Christopher has a rare smile for them as they disembark from the ship.

“How’s Lucy feeling?” Wyatt asks.

“Should’ve brought her back some sort of souvenir or something,” Jiya grins. “A _my friends went to 1947 and all they brought me was this lousy t-shirt_  t-shirt.”

Agent Christopher frowns. “Not sure what you’re talking about. Debriefing in thirty minutes.”

They all murmur their agreement, but Wyatt shoots her a strange look. He steps closer to her, lowering his voice as Rufus and Jiya head off to their bunks to grab a change of clothing.

“Did she get worse? Does she have a fever?”

“Who are you talking about?” Agent Christopher asks.

Wyatt stares at her in disbelief. “Lucy.”

“Lucy, who?”

“Our historian,” he says, even as terror begins to grip his throat so tightly he struggles to breathe. “Lucy Preston.”

Agent Christopher looks blankly at him, opening her mouth to answer, but a panicked shout from the hallway draws both of their gazes.

“Lucy’s stuff is gone,” Jiya gasps. “Her clothes, her bed, everything. It’s like she was never there.”

Wyatt pushes past her, storming down to the girls’ room, refusing to believe her until he sees it for himself.

“Who is Lucy?” he hears Agent Christopher ask behind him, and another wave of nausea threatens to overwhelm him. True to Jiya’s word, there’s only one bed, and no sign of Lucy. He stumbles, his shoulder hitting the wall in his haste to run back.

“I’ve got a question, too,” Rufus says, loudly, stepping out from the boys’ room and dragging an unfamiliar, older man by the sleeve. “Who the _hell_ is this guy?”

* * *

Whiskey, he needs whiskey.

He also needs his team back, including his stubborn, clever, resilient historian, but whiskey will do for now.

Lucy Preston is a professor at Stanford University, an only child, and as far as they can tell, has never met anyone who’s ever worked at Mason Industries.

Instead, her role in the team is filled by a man named Chaddington Shaw, and Wyatt is damn sure that this guy needs to _go_.

Shaw is in his mid-fifties, bitter, and boring. His skin is a little waxy, his greying haircut lopsided, and his teeth yellowed with coffee stains. Well aware of how Rittenhouse had inserted Lucy into their team with the hope of turning her to their side, Wyatt doesn’t trust Shaw for a minute. Agent Christopher informs them that the team dynamic has never been ideal, but somehow, miraculously, they have managed to complete their missions successfully up to this point.

Wyatt can’t bring himself to ask how they fooled Bonnie and Clyde in _this_ timeline.

In a flash of brilliance, Jiya grabs the flash drive they keep onboard the Lifeboat, showing Agent Christopher and Mason the videos they’d each made after Christopher had had the idea to preserve memories of her family from the original timeline. It’s enough to convince them, so they start looking into Lucy’s life, trying to track her down and figure out what changed in the past to affect her role in their present.

Well, Rufus and Jiya look into her life, while Wyatt paces like a caged tiger and snaps at anyone who tries to speak to him about anything else.

“We need to go get her,” he says.

“We can’t,” a voice answers, and he’s shocked to see that it’s Rufus disagreeing with him, rather than Agent Christopher. “Her parents are still Rittenhouse. She might already be indoctrinated.”

Wyatt shakes his head. “No way. I know her.”

“You don’t know _this_ her,” Jiya points out. “And they could have told her anything; she’d have no way of knowing what they’re really doing.”

“Rittenhouse is always one step ahead,” Wyatt snarls. “If they think we need her, they’re going to do their best to get in our way. We need to get her now, before they realize that she’s important to us and squirrel her away someplace we’ll never find her.”

There’s a moment of tense silence, and then Agent Christopher nods her approval.

“Wyatt,” she begins, pausing for a moment as she considers him. “You go. Best not to overwhelm her.” Her assertion that Wyatt will insist on being the one to retrieve Lucy goes unsaid.

That’s how he ends up in the blinding sunshine, outside of the bunker in the present day for the first time since Mason Industries blew up. He walks with a singular focus, repeating the address Jiya had given him over and over until he’s outside of her townhouse.

Turns out her engagement to the doctor hadn’t lasted, and she’d moved out to live on her own.

Hoping with everything he has that Lucy isn’t teaching a class today, he raises his fist to knock.

“Hang on, hang on…” her voice calls from inside, and Wyatt’s skin erupts in gooseflesh.

The door opens, and there she is. Hair in soft waves, pulled back in a ponytail. She’s wearing blue jeans and a loose white blouse, and her polite smile reaches her eyes in a way that tells him she hasn’t seen any of the pain that was tearing _his_ Lucy up inside.

“Hi! Can I help you?”

“Uh, hi. I’m Wyatt Logan,” he says, cringing internally and wishing he had thought this out before he came here. “You’re Lucy.”

Impossibly, her smile brightens even more with amusement. “I know who I am, Wyatt Logan.”

“Sorry,” he grimaces. “I know this is strange, and you don’t remember me, but I need to talk to you about something. Is it okay if I come in?”

Her head tilts to the side. “ _Remember_ you?”

“I can explain everything,” he says, earnestly, and she considers him for a moment before swinging the door wide to allow him to pass.

“I don’t know what it is about you, Wyatt Logan, but I trust you. Somehow.”

She gestures for him to sit on the couch, and he silently runs through everything he knows about her, trying to figure out where to start.

“This is probably going to sound crazy, but we used to work together. Well, we still do, I think,” he corrects himself, and his frustration increases at the expression on her face. “I’m doing such a bad job of this, I’m sorry. You would have known exactly the right thing to say.”

“I would have…” she echoes, confused.

“Something went wrong at our job,” he tries. “It’s… it’s affected your memories.”

He recognizes his mistake immediately, and she takes a step back. “You’re right. This _does_ sound crazy.”

“I can prove it,” Wyatt explains, “but you’ll need to come with me. I think you might be in danger.”

He reaches into his pocket, pulling out his wallet and the tiny, dog-eared photo he has of the two of them and Rufus, taken one night at a bar after a successful mission; she is laughing and her arms are thrown around her teammates’ shoulders. Lucy stares at it, her expression unreadable.

“You’re Lucy Preston, and you love history. You were recruited to join a covert ops team that needed your expertise. You have a younger sister, Amy, but she… she disappeared and we’re all trying to get her back. That,” he says, pointing to Rufus in the picture, “that’s our teammate, Rufus. He’s a genius, and an engineer, and he has a girlfriend named Jiya who works with us as well.” He’s desperate by this stage, hoping impossibly that the spell will break and recognition will dawn in her eyes.

It’s a promising sign, at least, that she hasn’t totally thrown him out already.

“There are people who want to stop you from helping our team,” he continues. “They might be looking for you. You should come with me now, we can go talk to our boss, figure out how to fix all… all of this.”

Her brown eyes flicker down at the picture again, her understanding of reality wavering with the proof in front of her. “There’s more?”

“There’s a video,” he says, eagerly. “One you took of yourself. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve got one, too.”

Lucy studies him again, sharply. “And you know me.”

“You’re claustrophobic,” he says in a rush. “You were trapped in a sinking car. A good Samaritan got you out, and you’ve been terrified of small spaces ever since. You revere your mother, but she’s overbearing and you feel like she’s always chosen your path for you. You know the date of every major historical event from the last three hundred years and can recite the details at any given moment. You-”

“Okay,” Lucy cuts him off. “Okay. I don’t know if I believe you, exactly, but I don’t _not_ believe you either. Just let me call my mom and tell her I’m going with you.”

“No!” Wyatt exclaims. “You can’t.”

Lucy flinches at his change in tone, her hand already on her cell.

There’s a heartbeat where he thinks he might have blown it, but then a deafening sound shatters the silence between them.

The kitchen window splinters into millions of fragments and a bullet strikes the drywall, followed by another that passes uncomfortably close to where Wyatt’s head had been. Lucy shrieks in terror, instinctively reaching for him as she ducks.

“Do you believe me now?” he asks, tightly. He points his gun toward the window as the shots continue, but he knows his window of time to whisk Lucy away is closing.

He’s seen this look in her eyes before, this sheer terror, when they’d travelled to the Alamo and taken cover while he fought back the spectre of his war-torn past. He aches for the moment when she’d brought him back, reminded him that she needed him, somehow convinced him that for the first time since he’d lost his wife, he had a reason to stick around.

“We need to get out of here,” she gasps, and he wordlessly takes her wrist and pulls her with him, shielding her with his body as they head for the back door.

It takes some skillful driving on his part, but they lose their Rittenhouse tail and can finally take a breath. Wyatt glances over to check Lucy for any sign of injury, and she seems shaken, but unhurt.

“They must have had someone watching your door, waiting for our team to show up,” he answers her unasked question.

“This isn’t my life,” she says, softly. Her hands shake a little as she runs them through her hair. “I’m just a history teacher. I don’t have any gaps in my memory. None of this can possibly be happening to me.”

“You _were_ a history teacher,” Wyatt corrects gently. “I promise this will all become so much clearer soon.”

He offers her a hand, and she hesitates for a few seconds before taking it.

She doesn’t let go as he leads her into the bunker, as he introduces Jiya and Rufus, or as she’s led into a room with a small black laptop with the flash drive in the port, ready to go.

“I can leave if you want your privacy,” Wyatt offers, and she shrugs.

“It’s not something I remember recording. I don’t know if there’s anything I need to keep private in there.”

There’s a brief pause as Agent Christopher makes her sign a tree’s worth of paperwork, non-disclosure forms and the like. Then someone hits play and Lucy appears with an uncertain smile, and the Lucy beside him can’t contain her gasp of shock.

_“This is weird… I don’t know how to start this. I guess if I’m watching this, it means someone messed with time, and my memories are gone, because time travel has a knack for destroying things in ways you can’t begin to predict. For example, my sister, Amy. I’m the only one who remembers her, because I came back from my first journey into the past to find she’d never existed. I keep a photo of her in a locket in the Lifeboat, because she was my best friend, and smart, and beautiful, and funny, and she deserves to be remembered.”_

Her eyes go a little glassy, but she shakes it off and glances off-camera. _“What else should I say?”_

 _“What else would you want to know if you had no recollection of the past few years?”_ Jiya’s voice asks.

 _“I’d want to know who I could trust. The answer to that is my team. Wyatt,”_ she says, pausing for a half-second. _“I can always trust Wyatt. And Rufus, and Jiya. Agent Christopher and Mason on a good day. Garcia Flynn on a very, very bad one. I wouldn’t trust my mother; she isn’t the Superwoman I always thought she was. Her priority is power, and she won’t let anything stand in her way, least of all, me.”_

It cuts off there, and Agent Christopher sighs, leaning back in her seat.

“Time travel?” Lucy echoes, sounding faint.

“Your extensive knowledge of history made you the perfect candidate,” Agent Christopher supplies.

Wyatt squeezes her hand again, and she looks at him. “Our job is to preserve history as much as possible, and protect it from people who want to change it. You’re a walking encyclopaedia, travel guide, and interpreter all rolled into one.” He opens her hand and places her locket on her palm, folding her fingers around it. “This is your necklace, and the last remaining picture of your sister. We keep it on the Lifeboat so it never becomes a casualty of time.”

“This… this is simultaneously giving me a headache and a panic attack,” she says, and Wyatt flinches at yet another reminder that his Lucy is both so close and so far away from him. “I need some time.”

“Jiya can take you,” Agent Christopher offers. “Get some rest and we’ll touch base later.”

Wyatt squeezes her hand one last time before she passes the locket back to him and pulls away, fleeing the room without looking back.

“Well, without her, fixing history might take some time,” Agent Christopher says, the gentle tone she’d used with Lucy completely replaced with her business-as-usual demeanor. “You’d best get Rufus and get to work.”

* * *

As predicted, figuring out how the timeline had affected Lucy directly proves a daunting task. It takes days of diagrams, tracing family trees, combing through old files, and they still come up empty handed at the end of it all.

Lucy flits in and out of their meetings, mostly just listening, still with an expression on her face halfway between terror and awe. Wyatt misses the closeness he’d had with her, wishes he hadn’t taken all their little moments for granted. He tries to find reasons to connect with this Lucy, and although she is just as kind and gifted, it feels as if he’s tried to recreate her out of carbon paper, a mere reflection of what he used to know.

It’s during one of these times when he’d brought her some documents to look over under the guise of hoping she’d have a breakthrough.

“You’ve spent all this time trying to work out _how_ my timeline has been affected,” she points out, offhandedly, and Wyatt is half-distracted by the way she taps her pen on the table to the rhythm of an old show tune, just as she had the day before the mission that had changed everything. “But what if it’s not _my_ timeline that has been affected in the first place?”

And of course, it immediately becomes clear as his gaze falls on the person doing paperwork in the next room, that the answer was in front of them the whole time, and they’d still had to rely on Lucy to see it.

Back in 1947, the Rittenhouse agent they’d caught should have gone on to kill a man by the name of Chaddington Shaw.

The second of his name, and father of one particularly bland man with a PhD in eighteenth century history.

It turns out that Wyatt was right not to trust Shaw from the beginning - like Lucy, he is a Rittenhouse legacy, his father having been recruited once the planted agent had been taken out of play. The organization had chosen to insert Shaw into the team over Lucy, and with her place filled by a man who never should have existed, she was never recruited.

They can’t go back to 1947, and as easy as it would be to go back to before Shaw was born and eliminate his father, Wyatt knows that Lucy would not condone cold-blooded murder in her name.

Again, it is Lucy who points out that death isn’t the only option.

“You have all of this information from his future, right at your fingertips. You’d just need to exploit it, scare him a little.”

The plan begins to form, falsifying a burn folder, a sheath of documents designed with technology Shaw Sr. couldn’t imagine. They will go back to 1952, when the CIA is well and truly established, and Rittenhouse has completed their recruitment of foreign intelligence operatives. They will use what they know of Shaw to convince him he has been exposed as Rittenhouse, and his only option is to flee the country under a new identity, and never return. He will never meet his wife, Myrna, and never have a son with her.

And Wyatt hopes with every scrap of his shredded heart that it _will_ be just that simple.

* * *

Lucy sits alone in the conference room, rewatching her video for the sixth, maybe seventh time. It astounds her still, just how much the woman on tape is both the same and different, familiar and unfamiliar. She speaks with a weight on her shoulders and an ache in her heart. She has known loss and betrayal and been forged in a crucible, emerging strong instead of destroyed.

She clicks to close the application, sighing and rubbing at her eyes. Sleep is elusive, and has been ever since Wyatt showed up on her doorstep claiming to know her.

And as she thinks of him, her eyes fall on his name, another video icon that flickers, then opens. She stares in shock for a moment, preparing to close it, feeling horrified with herself for even subconsciously wanting to invade his privacy so brazenly.

But the Wyatt onscreen looks nervous, younger somehow, though it could not have been filmed too long ago, and she is hooked. He is uncomfortably close to the camera at first, stepping back to sit as the lens focuses, and he pulls his fingers roughly over his hair several times, opening his mouth to speak and then snapping in shut several times before he manages to get the first, stilted sentences out.

_“Rufus is under strict instructions to show this video to you for one of the following reasons; first, you’ve forgotten Jessica. I don’t know how or why, but if the work that we do can erase the existence of one person, who’s to say it won’t happen again?”_

He sighs, scrubbing his hands over his face and through his hair once more.

_“Until six years ago, Jessica was your wife. You used to think forgetting her would be a gift, because the pain of losing her nearly destroyed you. You were reckless, and you didn’t care if you lived or died. But you can’t regret any of it, because loving Jess, and losing her, led you to take a dangerous assignment alongside a stubborn, infuriating know-it-all.”_

He smiles a little, and the fidgeting stops as he focuses on the camera.

_“That brings me to the second reason you would be watching this; that you’ve forgotten Lucy. It must be a dark place without Lucy Preston in your life. She once asked you, in Nazi Germany, how you find the strength to get through the hardest missions, and you told her that she just needed to figure out what she was fighting for. Well, somewhere along the way, Lucy became your reason to fight, and your reason to live. She’s saved your life more times than you can count, and in more ways than one. Losing her would be… unthinkable.”_

He trails off for a moment, his eyes the slate gray color of a sea in a thunderstorm.

 _“You have been lucky enough to have the lightning-bolt moment twice. Don’t let the memory of Jess keep you from being open to the possibilities. You are,”_ Wyatt’s voice breaks a little, and he swallows. _“You are in love with Lucy Preston. Please don’t let that go.”_

There’s a haunting moment as he stares down the lens of the camera, then at his hands, clasped tightly in front of him. Then he slowly gets to his feet and goes to switch the camera off, and Lucy is left staring at a black screen.

She brushes her fingers impatiently against her cheeks, closing the laptop and trying to breathe against the onslaught of emotion. A part of her had known - how could she not? He looks at her with faraway eyes sometimes, waiting for a breath of recognition that will never come.

And now, with only minutes to go until they make the jump into the past that they’re hoping will correct their mistake, she has been given this one chance to do something meaningful, something that will carry over into their reality even as hers is erased from existence. After that, she’ll be nothing more than a bad blip on their world-saving radar.

She corners Wyatt in the main staging area of the Lifeboat, the chatter and movement around them giving a somewhat convincing illusion of privacy.

“Before you go, I have to say something.”

He quirks an eyebrow at her. “Yeah?”

“Don’t be mad, but I saw your video. On the flash drive,” she clarifies, and the color drains from his face. “I’m… I’m sorry that I’m not _her_. It must be… awful.”

“Lucy,” he says, one word filled with a weary sadness that nearly shatters her heart.

“I’m a bit jealous of her, you know? She’s travelled through time, lived through things I can only read in books, met people I can only dream about. And I… I’ve never been in love. Not even come close, not really. Now I’ve had a first row seat to her story, a taste of it, only for it to get taken away. I know it’s stupid to feel… cheated, because she and I are one and the same person.”

“It’s not stupid,” Wyatt protests, looking as if he wants to take her hand, but thinking better of it.

“I want you to promise me something,” she continues, ignoring him. “When you get _her_ back, I want you to promise me you’ll tell her the truth about how you feel.”

He flinches. “It’s complicated.”

“She cares about you, too. I can see it in the way she says your name. And she’s lucky to have you,” she says, wryly. “That kind of love shouldn’t become a casualty of time.”

He looks at her for a moment, tense and wild-eyed. She’s not sure if he’s going to kiss her or flee, and she doesn’t think he knows, either.

“I feel a little like I’m on my deathbed,” she jokes, hollowly. “Although, I suppose I won’t know anything has changed.”

Wyatt walks towards her, and she’s frozen to the spot, but he simply rests warm, reassuring hands on her shoulders and presses a soft kiss to her forehead.

“Promise me,” she whispers, tearfully.

“I promise,” he answers, and then he’s gone.

The gears around the capsule groan to life, a metallic python coiling around its prey.

She watches, entranced, in awe at the final, undeniable proof of a _time machine_ , and as the huge craft seems to fold in on itself with a sudden burst of wind, she thinks of Wyatt-

* * *

The moment the Lifeboat lands back in the present day, Wyatt is stumbling down the stairs, ignoring the motion sickness as he calls her name.

“Lucy!”

Mason steps into his way, concern evident on his face, and Wyatt almost growls with impatience, with this new obstacle standing between him and the knowledge that Lucy is alive and well with all memories intact.

“Master Sergeant, perhaps you have forgotten the protocol-”

“Screw protocol,” Wyatt snaps. “Is Lucy here?”

Mason blinks at him in confusion.

“Is she here?” Wyatt demands again, his voice rising in desperation.

“Of course I’m here,” a soft voice answers from the doorway. “Where else would I be?”

Amid Rufus and Jiya’s exclamations of relief, Wyatt pushes past Mason and crosses the room to her in several long strides, sweeping her up into a tight embrace. He presses his nose into her hair, squeezing his eyes tightly shut against the burn of tears.

“What happened?” she asks him, softly. “Did something… did I…?”

“You didn’t remember us,” Jiya explains, and Lucy lifts her gaze to them in time to see Rufus point to Wyatt and mouth _it messed him up_. “How are you feeling? How long have we been gone?”

“I’m fine, woke up this morning good as new. And you left yesterday,” Lucy answers, unconsciously threading her fingers through the short hair at the back of Wyatt’s head.

“It’s been a few days for us,” Rufus says. “Took a while to figure out what happened and how to fix it, but we got it eventually.”

Wyatt finally lets go of Lucy, having gathered control of himself once more.

“You met me, in this other timeline?” she asks, trying to keep her tone light, but he clenches his teeth at her words.

“I’ll tell you about it later.”

Protocol kicks in then, a quick health check before a full debrief of the mission and the details of the alternate timeline, although Wyatt is reticent when it comes to describing his interactions with Lucy. He expects her to snort, or grimace, at the mention of the man known as Chaddington Shaw, but instead, she pulls up an article online that references a former CIA agent who fled the United States in 1952 and was presumed a communist sympathizer.

“His name is famous in conspiracy theorist circles, up there with D.B. Cooper,” she explains, flashing a weak smile at the team. “So I guess you managed to change history a little after all.”

He can’t quite bring himself to smile back at her, and she blinks, uncertain. She’s not sure exactly what changed for him, but this new dynamic is throwing her off balance, and she is struggling to find a foothold.

Then they are finally left alone, and after a few minutes of silence, Wyatt slowly, haltingly begins to recount the details he’d left out.

He pulls out the laptop, somehow identical to the one he’d left in the other timeline, and smiles at the perplexed expression on her face.

“I promised her I would show you this.” Wyatt offers her a flash drive. “It’s… well, she saw it by accident, and she thought you deserved to see it, too.”

Lucy’s confusion clears at the opening lines of his video, pausing it to look at him in shock. “This is… I can’t watch this. It’s private.”

He wordlessly gestures for her to go ahead, and she presses play, watching carefully, folding her legs up under herself as she always does when she’s feeling unsure about something.

He still catalogs her body language, even now; _especially_ now, when everything hinges on this moment.

_“You are in love with Lucy Preston. Please don’t let that go.”_

More silence stretches between them, cavernous and oppressive. Tears fall unchecked from her cheeks, her shoulders hitching slightly.

“I… I don’t… _Wyatt-_ ”

“I’ve known it for a while,” he says. “I knew when you were missing for those six weeks, and I thought I’d lost you. I think I’d even known it before, though I’m not quite sure when it began; somewhere between 1937 and 1882 is my best guess.”

“Wyatt, please…”

He grips her hands, then, sitting on the conference table to face her. They have always been better at communicating through touch, but he needs to say the words, and she needs to hear them.

“I love you,” he murmurs. “You deserve to know that.”

Her intake of breath is sharp, but her gaze is steady as she finally looks him in the eye. There he sees the fire that he knows, the strength and resilience that he’d missed. “I love you, too,” she tells him.

He stands, pulling her to her feet and into his embrace, and she tucks her face against his shoulder as he kisses her hair. It is right and it is home; it is the alignment of the final puzzle piece and the familiar warmth of a well-loved blanket.

“I think we’ve earned a rest day,” Lucy points out with a contented sigh.

“Anything particular in mind?” Wyatt asks, a slow grin spreading across his face.

She traces her fingertips along the muscles of his back, and he rubs his thumb on her shoulder in answer. “I need to have a word to Jiya and Rufus about the roommate arrangements.”

“They _might_ already have an idea,” he confirms, glancing at the window to the conference room where the pair are unashamedly watching them and cheering.

A siren in the control room goes off, then, a flashing red light warning them of the Mothership’s impending jump to another time. Agent Christopher calls from the hallway, informing them that they have exactly two hours to rest before the Lifeboat goes after Emma Whitmore. Wyatt and Lucy groan together in frustration.

“A time traveller’s work is never done,” he says, ducking his head down to meet her for a quick but longing kiss.

“We’ve got two hours, at least,” she answers, her words almost lost against his lips, and he wordlessly leads the way to one of the bunk rooms, not caring which, shoving a chair in front of the door. “Oh, and Wyatt?”

“Mm?”

Lucy cradles his jaw in her hands, a spark of mischief in her eyes and a sugar-sweet tone in her voice as she forces him to listen. “That’s the last time you ever go on a mission without me, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wyatt answers, dutifully.

He kisses her again, and they tumble into bed - his, as it turns out - grateful for even a brief interlude before they have to face their enemy once more.


End file.
